Kavita Daswani - For Matrimonial Purposes

Sheryl narrowed her eyes.

‘So, what went wrong?’ she asked, taking in my brown complexion.

‘Oh, I stopped using it. It just got to be a drag, a bit smelly and it stung. My aunt blames that for my lack of proposals. She says nobody wants a dark wife.

‘You know how little girls dream of what they want to be when they grow up – an air-hostess, a movie star, a queen?’ I continued. ‘I used to tell my mother what my dreams were. I wanted to be a social worker, or a manicurist, I couldn’t decide. I saw them both as helping people. But my mother only said, “First get married, then do what you want.” I think I was twelve.

‘It wasn’t just me though. There was a big bunch of us girls, cousins and friends and neighbours’ children, all the same age, and we went to birthday parties and ate jam sandwiches and we used to only talk about the kind of men we would marry. My best friend from school, Indu, she even had a name for her dream husband. Suresh. She liked that name. She said he would have his hair parted down the middle, and that he would be taller than her, and that she would get lots of diamonds on her wedding day, and also a big house and a fancy car. That’s how she saw her life.’

‘Did she get that?’

‘Yup. At seventeen. A proposal that came through her aunt. They got engaged after talking for an hour in the lobby of the President Hotel, surrounded by both sets of parents. He was everything Indu said she would find, except his name was Sanjay. They have twin boys, and she rides around Bombay in the back of an air-conditioned Mercedes.’

‘So, happily ever after?’ Sheryl asked.

‘Not really. I think he ignores her most of the time.’

I toyed with the slim gold bracelets around my wrist, and went quiet for a minute as I remembered my old friend Indu, and thought how our lives were so different now. Even she, I knew, disapproved of me.

‘As soon as Indu was married, everyone started looking for a husband for me. She and I were the same age. My mother had taught me everything I needed to be a good wife, and really, I had to compensate for being so dark. So I learnt how to make perfect Indian tea, with just the right amount of condensed milk and elaichi . Blindfolded, I could tell the difference between the dozens of bottles of spices on our kitchen shelves. I could make samosas, no problem. And all the Indian bhajis , even the complicated ones, were a breeze. They used to take me to visit people, and say, “See our daughter, all grown up now, she can do everything, cooking and all, and she’s such a sensible and clever girl.” In that sense, I suppose they are pretty proud of me.’

‘And now, here you are. Away from all that,’ Sheryl observed. ‘Who would have thought it?’

Given where I had come from, and the circumstances that had brought me here, who indeed?

The father who does not give away his daughter in marriage at the proper time is censurable.

Sources of Indian Tradition , Volume 1, edited by W. M. Theodore de Bary

In my early twenties, I had never had any intention of leaving home before becoming someone’s wife. Heading off, solo and independent, was unthinkable and irrevocably scandalous, and would effectively seal the coffin on my parents’ endeavours to find me a husband.

Long before I started thinking otherwise, my mother had started us down on the more traditional path. Two days after my twenty-first birthday, she called Udhay, the most noted astrologer in Bombay. His tiny cubby-hole on the streets of Colaba – flanked by a seller of dog-eared Mills & Boon books and a hawker peddling flea-smattered limp leaf vegetables – was a regular stop-off point for Bombayites and their visiting relatives. They called on him for advice about whether to invest in a new stock, move house, when to undergo the angioplasty, should the marriage proposal be accepted.

‘He’s verrrry good,’ Aunt Jyoti had said to my mother a week earlier. ‘Remember when we were having all those problems with our flat in Mysore, trying to evict the tenants? He told us on what day we should appoint the lawyer and start the legal proceedings. Believe me, Leela, within just a few weeks the problem was solved. I’ve been hearing verrry good things about him from my friends also. Bas , definitely you should show Anju’s chhati. You still have her birth chart somewhere, no? Really, Leela, she’s completed twenty-one now, she’s graduated, but still no boys are coming for her. He’ll definitely tell you when it will happen. Put your mind at ease, no?’

Fortunately, Udhay said that for a higher fee, he would make a house call, as my mother expressed her anxiety about being seen lingering outside his painted blue cubicle. Doubtless, someone would see her, and within precisely forty-five seconds, it would be all over Bombay society that there was, surely, something wrong in our family.

‘Hah, hah, no problem, I’ll come,’ said Udhay, when my mother called him one evening. ‘But vill you send me your car and driver?’

He looked educated enough. No dhoti around his thin brown legs or tilok on his forehead. Indeed, he could have been a middle-rung civil servant, in his polyester shirt and trousers, with his sun-chapped feet in tatty chappal s, and toting a brown leather satchel that looked as if it had barely survived World War Two.

‘So, vot is the problem?’ he asked, once seated, a cup of chai on the table next to him.

‘My daughter,’ said my mother, pointing to me, appropriately dressed for the occasion as I was in an unadorned cotton salwar kameez. ‘She has just completed twenty-one, and my husband and I are most worried, as no boys are approaching us. Maybe there is some grechari ?’ she asked. This is a black cosmic cloud that is said to hang over the heads of the unfortunate, woebegone souls who are about to go bankrupt, lose a limb, or remain single for another year.

‘Ha, ha, don’t vurry, ve vill see vot is the problem,’ Udhay replied, reaching into his fatigued satchel to pull out the Hindu almanac, a pad of paper and pencil and a calculator.

‘Do you have her chart here?’ he asked.

My mother handed over a laminated sheet covered with elaborate drawings and interspersed with the names of planets in Hindi. Udhay consulted his almanac, jotting down numbers and punching in figures on his Casio hand-held calculator, muttering under his breath.

I sat on my sweaty hands, my mother next to me, both of us quiet but anxious, the only sound in the room from the sleepy whirring of the air-conditioner behind us.

All of my friends had already been forced to have their charts read – or their mothers had done so surreptitiously – so I knew I had no choice but to sit through it. Since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Jai Hind College in nearby Churchgate, I had been having a rather grand time – or at least as grand a time as could be managed by a young girl in Bombay with a curfew and somewhat neurotic parents. But I needed to get serious about marriage, and this was the first step. So I adjusted the soft chiffon dupatta that was slipping off my shoulders and looked at Udhay’s face for any hint of what was to come. I knew, having heard about my friends’ experiences, that whatever he said in the next half-hour would set the tone for the rest of the day, indeed, the next several weeks. If the news was good – that I could and would be married within the year, to a good boy, good family, and all that, then my mother would be in such a fine and sparkling mood that my brothers would be allowed to hang out with their friends after school for at least an hour longer than usual.